Henry Luce

For over forty years, Henry Luce commanded what may well have been the most important publishing empire of the middle twentieth century. His magazines -- Time, Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated -- were the most popular and profitable periodicals in America. His March of Time newsreels created a sensation and won an Academy Award.

But for Luce, professional and financial success were not his most important goals. His life was shaped as much by a sense of purpose as it was by conventional ambition. The son of a missionary, he sought throughout his life to pursue missions of his own -- to use his power to shape the character of the nation. He believed that beneath the diversity of American life, there was a shared national culture, and he believed that his magazines could help reveal and strengthen it. This was both the great achievement of his media empire, and also its most controversial feature.

The remarkable popularity of his magazines -- with its vast readerships (Life alone attracted over 20 million readers) -- did little to silence the many critics who accused him of turning journalism into crude propaganda. Luce largely ignored his critics, whose attacks did little to dampen the success of his company, but he privately bridled at what he considered their unfairness.

In the end, what set him apart from other powerful publishers and editors was his determination to shape the content of his magazines -- to make his opinions and his beliefs the basis of what his editors and reporters printed. He was often thwarted in that effort, but he never abandoned it.

"The Gamble of Our Lives"

Henry R. Luce (called Harry by family and friends) was born in Tengchow, China in 1898, the son of a Protestant missionary. For the first ten years of his life, he lived in the missionary compound, surrounded by other westerners, before enrolling in a British boarding school on the coast of Hunan province. Harry hated the school, but flourished academically; and at age 14, he set off on his own to enroll at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. That was where he met his classmate Briton Hadden, the man who -- with the exception of his own father -- became the most important person in his life. Friends, rivals, and indispensable partners, they worked together and competed with one another through both prep school and Yale. And only two years after they graduated from college, they launched Time magazine -- which Luce called "the gamble of our lives on which everything depends" -- and shepherded it from an obscure magazine to one of the most important sources of news in mid-century America.

Time was not to everyone's taste, with its idiosyncratic language and its many gratuitous opinions. But for its hundreds of thousands (and eventually millions) of readers -- most of whom had in the past received news only from provincial local papers -- Time was among the first publications that made the news of the world available to people in all parts of the nation. Time became a kind of glue, providing professional and other (mostly middle class) people a common, reliable, and concise guide to information that was now more important to them than ever before.

Hadden, a brilliant but hard-living editor, died in 1929 of a strep infection, leaving Luce to rule alone. Luce wasted no time in expanding his company's reach. He launched Fortune in 1930 -- a spectacularly beautiful magazine that was also an important innovation in business journalism, which for a time attracted some of the nation's best writers. Not long after, Time Inc. created "The March of Time" newsreels. And in 1936, Luce published the first issues of Life, the most popular magazine in American history and, for a time, by far the most lucrative. Derived from some of the early picture magazines of Europe, Luce and his colleagues created what came to be known as "The Great American Magazine." It was distinctive both for the quality of its photographs and for its optimistic, consensual tone. Above all, it provided a visual image of its time and revealed (as Luce wrote in his famous prospectus) "the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud . . . strange things -- machines, armies, multitudes, shadow in the jungle and on the moon . . . things hidden behind walls and within rooms; things dangerous to come to." Years later, in 1954, Luce launched the first serious sports magazine -- Sports Illustrated. Like Fortune, it relied on good writers (among them William Faulkner, A. J. Liebling, Wallace Stegner, Budd Schulberg, and John Steinbeck). Luce insisted that it should elevate the world of sports from being "just a game" to being a metaphor for the human condition.

The Time Inc. publications were extraordinarily expensive to publish and distribute, but Luce resisted economizing and believed that spending more money to create greater quality was the best strategy for success. As one of his associates put it, they moved ahead without compromising in "an atmosphere of complete and serene confidence" to grasp "the chance of a lifetime."

"Luces the Magnificent"

By the mid-1930s, Luce's ambitions were moving beyond his publishing empire. He sought, and achieved, great personal fame and significant influence. He divorced his devoted, but conventionally social, first wife to marry one of the most famous women in America - Clare Boothe Luce. She was not only a socialite and a woman of fashion, but also a prominent magazine editor. Their marriage cooled quickly, but it raised both their public profiles. They were, Luce once said, the "Luces the Magnificent" --as exemplified by their great wealth, their lavish homes, their social prominence, and their presumed power.

Through turbulence, misery, and tragedy, they stayed together throughout their lives as both their careers soared. Clare became a successful playwright and journalist, then a member of Congress and an important figure in the Republican party. In the 1950s, she became ambassador to Italy. Harry not only ran his company, but began to play a role in shaping American policy. He too flirted at times with running for public office, and privately (but hopelessly) wanted to be named secretary of state under Eisenhower. But instead, he used the power of his magazines to try to shape the character of the nation and the world. Beginning in 1939, he became a prominent internationalist. He helped persuade Roosevelt to provide military support to Britain before Pearl Harbor. He was an early promoter of American intervention into World War II -- perhaps most visibly through the publication of his famous essay "The American Century," in which he wrote that "we are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western Civilization...It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which [American] ideals spread throughout the world."

At the same time, he became a strong supporter of the Republican party and was a strong and influential supporter of Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate. Luce's political infatuation with Willkie was only the beginning of his fascination with people he considered great men: Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even (toward the end of his life) John F. Kennedy. Absent from this list was Franklin Roosevelt, whom Luce came to despise (a sentiment reciprocated by the president) -- largely because of Luce's contempt for Roosevelt's evasiveness and, he believed, mendacity. ("It is my duty to go on hating him," he said after FDR's death.)

Losing China

One of Luce's most fervent hopes was to see a modernized (and Christianized) China, the country of his birth. He believed that China could join the company of great nations and could become are part of the industrialized (and westernized) world. Chiang-kai Shek, the president of China, was a corrupt and inept leader, who struggled through both a war with Japan and a civil war with the Chinese Communists. Luce dismissed the stories of Chiang's weaknesses and dismissed reporters (among them Theodore H. White) who did not share his optimism. He struggled to ensure the future of Chiang's China -- through World War II, and during the four years after as the Nationalist government crumbled and the communists triumphed. Above all, he used his magazines to promote Chiang and his government, to the chagrin of many of his journalist colleagues who had no faith in the Nationalist regime and who bridled at Luce's shaping of the news to fit his own hopes.

He never reconciled himself to China's "fall," and spent much of the rest of his life searching for ways to overturn the communist regime. He joined the growing chorus of denunciation of the Truman State Department for what he considered its weakness in combating communism and defending China. When America entered the Korean War, Luce proposed "unleashing Chiang Kai-shek" and expanding the conflict into China. In 1954, when the French abandoned Vietnam to the communists, Luce again hoped that American intervention would not only drive the communists out of Vietnam, but also out of China. Even in the last year of his life, he continued to berate the government's failure to "save" China.

The Complexity of Luce

It was easy to characterize Luce as a conservative polemicist preoccupied by his obsessions with China and other unpopular causes. But there was another side to Luce that reveals a more complicated man than his public image often revealed. He called himself a liberal - by which he meant, in part, a belief in progress and change. But he also embraced some of the new postwar liberal ideas. He was a longstanding supporter of racial equality, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through his life. He believed in labor unions. He supported Willkie not just because he was a Republican, but because he was a moderately liberal Republican committed to internationalism. He attacked Joseph McCarthy (and described him on Time's cover as a "demagogue") long before most other news organizations did. Once, when asked what he would do if given a choice between fascism and communism, he replied that he would choose communism, because at least it tried to help the masses. In 1960, although he tepidly endorsed Nixon, he showed great respect toward John Kennedy. And in 1964, although he never confirmed it, he seems likely to have voted for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.

Throughout the 1950s, Luce crusaded for ideas and people he believed in. He was a loyal supporter of Eisenhower and took great pleasure out of his close relationship with him. He helped launch a quixotic movement to promote the "rule of law" in the world (which he and others believed could help undermine communism.) He was a leader of an effort to create a National Presbyterian Church in Washington. He organized a committee to study the idea of a "national purpose," and he helped publish a series of essays by prominent thinkers that, for a time, attracted significant attention.

His private life remained much less successful than his public one. Both he and Clare had frequent extramarital affairs, and they spent little time together. Twice, Harry tried to divorce her and remarry, but Clare fought tenaciously and successfully to thwart him -- in part by threatening to weaken his control of his company. But their relationship was not entirely combative. There remained a residue of real companionship, and perhaps even love, that emerged periodically out of the rubble of their lives -- sometimes in unusual ways. Clare, a champion of LSD as a source of serenity and enlightenment, persuaded Harry to join her in trying the drug at their home in Phoenix. He disliked the experience, but shared her interest in its powers. And after his retirement from his company in 1964, he spent much of his time with Clare and traveled frequently with her until his sudden death by a heart attack in 1967.

Henry Luce was one of the most influential figures of his time, and yet many of the legacies that he hoped to leave behind him were not the ones that have endured. He wanted to be known as a powerful force in shaping American foreign policy, but there is nothing to suggest that his views had any real impact. He wanted to see the Republican party the dominant political force in America, and he wanted to play an important role in shaping its future. But he failed to elect the man he most wanted to see as President, Wendell Willkie; and despite his warm (and much coveted) friendship with Eisenhower, he did not have much influence over the President's policies. He hoped to use his power to present a picture of a united nation and a consensual culture, only to live long enough to see the unraveling of what he thought was a nationally shared set of principles and beliefs.

But Luce did leave an important legacy, nevertheless. It was his success in creating new forms of information and communications at a moment in history when media were rapidly changing and expanding. His magazines - and the model of innovation they represented -- were always his most important achievements.

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